Jonathan Kellerman - When The Bough Breaks

"Lack of conscience."

"Right. And an inability to relate to other people except by exploiting them. The good ones have a glib, smooth facade, often they're good - looking. Usually above - average intelligence. Sexually manipulative. A predilection to engage in cons, blackmail, frauds."

Milo's eyes opened wide.

"Handler."

"Of course. We've been thinking of him as the doctor in the case and assuming psychological normalcy - he's been protected, in our eyes, by his role. But take a closer look. What do we know about him? He was involved in insurance fraud. He tried to blackmail Roy Longstreth, using his power as a psychiatrist. He seduced at least one patient - Elaine Gutierrez - and who knows how many more? And those putdowns in the margins of his notes - at first I thought they were evidence of burnout, but now I don't know. That was cold, pretending to listen to people, taking their money, insulting them. His notes were confidential - he never expected anyone else to read them. He could hang it all out, show his true colors. Milo, I tell you the guy comes across like your classic psychopath."

"The evil doctor."

"Not exactly a rara avis, is it? If there can be a Mengele, why not scores of Morton Handlers? What better facade for an intelligent psychopath than the title of Doctor - it yields instant prestige and credibility." "Psychopathic doctor and psychopathic patient." He mulled it over. "Not buddies, but partners in crime."

"Sure. Psychopaths don't have buddies. Only victims and accomplices. Bruno must have been Handler's dream come true if he was plotting something and needed one of his own kind for help. I'll bet you those first sessions were incredible, the two of them hungry hyenas, checking each other out, looking over their shoulders, sniffing the ground."

"Why Bruno, in particular? Handler treated other psychopaths."

"They were too crude. Short - order cooks, cowboys, construction workers. Handler needed a smooth type. Besides, how do we know how many of those guys were deliberately misdiagnosed like Longstreth?"

"Just to play devil's advocate for one second - one of those jokers was in law school."

I thought about it for a minute.

"Too young. In Handler's eyes a callow punk. In a few years, with degree in hand and a veneer of sophistication, maybe. Handler needed a businessman type' for what he wanted to pull off. Someone really slick. And Bruno appears to have fit that bill. He fooled Gershman, who's no idiot."

Milo got up and paced the room, running his fingers through his hair, creating a bird's nest.

"It's definitely appealing. Shrinker and shrinkee pulling off a scam." He seemed amused.

"It's not the first time, Milo. There was a guy back East a few years ago - very good credentials. Married into a rich family and started a clinic for juvenile delinquents - back when they still called them that. He used his in - laws' social connections to organize fund - raising soirees for the clinic. While the champagne flowed, the j.d."s were busy burglarizing the partygoers' townhouses. They finally caught him with a warehouse full of silver and crystal, furs and rugs. He didn't even need the stuff. He was doing it for the challenge. They sent him away to one of those discreet institutions in the rolling hills of southern Maryland - for all I know he's running the place by now. It never hit the papers. I found out about it through the professional grapevine. Convention gossip."

Milo pulled out his pencil. He started writing, thinking out loud.

"To the marble corridors of high finance. Bank records, brokerage statements, businesses filed under fictitious names. See what's left in the safe - deposit boxes after the IRS has done its dirty work. County assessor for info on property ventures. Insurance claims out of Handler's office." He stopped. "I hope this gets me somewhere, Alex. This goddamn case hasn't helped my status in the department. The captain is aiming for promotion and he wants to show more arrests. Handler and Gutierrez weren't ghetto types he can afford to let fade away. And he's running scared that Glendale will solve Bruno first and make us look like shmucks. You remember Bianchi."

I nodded. A small - town police chief in Bellingham, Washington, had caught the Hillside Strangler - something the LAPD. war machine hadn't been able to do.

He got up, went into the kitchen and ate half of a cold chicken standing over the sink. He washed it down with a quart of orange juice and came back wiping his mouth.

"I don't know why I'm fighting not to laugh, up to my ass in dead bodies and no apparent progress, but it seems so funny, Handler and Bruno. You send a guy to a shrink to get his head straight and the doc is as fucked - up as the patient and systematically puts the warp on him."

Put that way it didn't sound funny. He laughed anyway.

"What about the girl?" he asked.

"Gutierrez? What about her."

"Well, I was thinking about those social roles. We've been looking at her as the innocent bystander. If Handler could connive with one patient, why not with two?"

"It's not impossible. But we know Bruno was psychopathic. Any of that kind of evidence about her?"

"No," he admitted. "We looked for Handler's file on her and couldn't find it. Maybe he shredded it when their relationship changed. Do you guys do that?"

"I wouldn't know. I never slept with my patients - or their mothers."

"Don't be touchy. I tried to interview her family. The old, plump mamacita, two brothers, one of 'em with those angry, macho eyes. There's no father - he died ten years ago. The three of them live in a tiny place in Echo Park. When I got there they were in the middle of mourning. The place was full of the girl's pictures, in shrines. Lots of candles, baskets of food, weeping neighbors. The brothers were sullen. Mama barely spoke English. I made a serious attempt to be sensitive, culturally aware and all that. I borrowed Sanchez from Ramparts Division to translate. We brought food, kept a low profile. I got nada. Hear no evil, speak no evil. I honestly don't think they knew much about Elena's life. To them West LAs as distant as Atlantis. But even if they did they sure as hell weren't going to tell me."

"Even," I asked, "if it would help find her murderer?"

He looked at me wearily.

"Alex, people like that don't think the police can help them. To them la policia are the bastards who roust their cholos and insult their home girls and are never around when the low riders cruise the neighborhood at night with their lights off and pop shotgun shells through bedroom windows. Which reminds me - I interviewed a friend of the girl. Her roommate, also a teacher. This one was outwardly hostile. Made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me. Her brother had been killed five years ago in a gang shootout and the police did nothing for her and her family then, so to hell with me now."

He got up and padded around the room like a tired lion.

"In summation, Elaine Gutierrez is a cipher. But there's nothing to indicate she wasn't as pure as the freshly driven snow."

He looked miserable, plagued with self - doubt.

"It's a tough case, Milo. Don't be so hard on yourself."

"It's funny you should say that. That's what my mother used to tell me. Go easy, Milo Bernard. Don't be such a profectionist - that was the way she pronounced it. The whole family had a tradition of low personal expectations. Drop out of school in tenth grade, go to work at the foundry, lay out a life for yourself of plastic dishes, TV, church picnics, and steel splinters that stuck in your skin. After thirty years enough pension and disability to give you a weekend in the Ozarks once in a while, if you're lucky. My dad did it, his dad, and both of my brothers. The Sturgis game plan. But not the profectionist. For one, the game plan worked best if you got married and I'd been liking boys since I was nine. And second - this was more important - I figured I was too smart to do what the rest of those peasants were doing. So I broke the mold, shocked them all. And the hotshot who everyone thought was going to become a lawyer or a professor or at least some kind of accountant goes and ends up as a member of la policia. Ain't that something for a guy who wrote a goddamn thesis on transcendentalism in the poetry of Walt Whitman?"